OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning and Inverse Reinforcement Learning with System 1 and System 2
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Inferring a person's goal from their behavior is an important problem in applications of AI (e.g. automated assistants, recommender systems). The workhorse model for this task is the rational actor model - this amounts to assuming that people have stable reward functions, discount the future exponentially, and construct optimal plans. Under the rational actor assumption techniques such as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can be used to infer a person's goals from their actions. A competing model is the dual-system model. Here decisions are the result of an interplay between a fast, automatic, heuristic-based system 1 and a slower, deliberate, calculating system 2. We generalize the dual system framework to the case of Markov decision problems and show how to compute optimal plans for dual-system agents. We show that dual-system agents exhibit behaviors that are incompatible with rational actor assumption. We show that naive applications of rational-actor IRL to the behavior of dual-system agents can generate wrong inference about the agents' goals and suggest interventions that actually reduce the agent's overall utility. Finally, we adapt a simple IRL algorithm to correctly infer the goals of dual system decision-makers. This allows us to make interventions that help, rather than hinder, the dual-system agent's ability to reach their true goals.
Can Synthetic Faces Undo the Damage of Dataset Bias to Face Recognition and Facial Landmark Detection?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

It is well known that deep learning approaches to face recognition and facial landmark detection suffer from biases in modern training datasets. In this work, we propose to use synthetic face images to reduce the negative effects of dataset biases on these tasks. Using a 3D morphable face model, we generate large amounts of synthetic face images with full control over facial shape and color, pose, illumination, and background. With a series of experiments, we extensively test the effects of priming deep nets by pre-training them with synthetic faces. We observe the following positive effects for face recognition and facial landmark detection tasks: 1) Priming with synthetic face images improves the performance consistently across all benchmarks because it reduces the negative effects of biases in the training data. 2) Traditional approaches for reducing the damage of dataset bias, such as data augmentation and transfer learning, are less effective than training with synthetic faces. 3) Using synthetic data, we can reduce the size of real-world datasets by 75% for face recognition and by 50% for facial landmark detection while maintaining performance. Thus, offering a means to focus the data collection process on less but higher quality data.
PersEmoN: A Deep Network for Joint Analysis of Apparent Personality, Emotion and Their Relationship
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Apparent personality and emotion analysis are both central to affective computing. Existing works solve them individually. In this paper we investigate if such high-level affect traits and their relationship can be jointly learned from face images in the wild. To this end, we introduce PersEmoN, an end-to-end trainable and deep Siamese-like network. It consists of two convolutional network branches, one for emotion and the other for apparent personality. Both networks share their bottom feature extraction module and are optimized within a multi-task learning framework. Emotion and personality networks are dedicated to their own annotated dataset. Furthermore, an adversarial-like loss function is employed to promote representation coherence among heterogeneous dataset sources. Based on this, we also explore the emotion-to-apparent-personality relationship. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PersEmoN.
Analyzing Machine Learning Workloads Using a Detailed GPU Simulator
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Most deep neural networks deployed today are trained using GPUs via high-level frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. This paper describes changes we made to the GPGPU-Sim simulator to enable it to run PyTorch by running PTX kernels included in NVIDIA's cuDNN library. We use the resulting modified simulator, which has been made available publicly with this paper, to study some simple deep learning workloads. With our changes to GPGPU-Sim's functional simulation model, we find GPGPU-Sim performance model running a cuDNN enabled implementation of LeNet for MNIST reports results within 30% of real hardware. Using GPGPU-Sim's AerialVision performance analysis tool we observe that cuDNN API calls contain many varying phases and appear to include potentially inefficient microarchitecture behaviour such as DRAM partition bank camping, at least when executed on GPGPU-Sim's current performance model.
Low-Resolution Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Whilst recent face-recognition (FR) techniques have made significant progress on recognising constrained high-resolution web images, the same cannot be said on natively unconstrained low-resolution images at large scales. In this work, we examine systematically this under-studied FR problem, and introduce a novel Complement Super-Resolution and Identity (CSRI) joint deep learning method with a unified end-to-end network architecture. We further construct a new large-scale dataset TinyFace of native unconstrained low-resolution face images from selected public datasets, because none benchmark of this nature exists in the literature. With extensive experiments we show there is a significant gap between the reported FR performances on popular benchmarks and the results on TinyFace, and the advantages of the proposed CSRI over a variety of state-of-the-art FR and super-resolution deep models on solving this largely ignored FR scenario. The TinyFace dataset is released publicly at: https://qmul-tinyface.github.io/.
Task-generalizable Adversarial Attack based on Perceptual Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be easily fooled by adding human imperceptible perturbations to the images. These perturbed images are known as `adversarial examples' and pose a serious threat to security and safety critical systems. A litmus test for the strength of adversarial examples is their transferability across different DNN models in a black box setting (i.e. when the target model's architecture and parameters are not known to attacker). Current attack algorithms that seek to enhance adversarial transferability work on the decision level i.e. generate perturbations that alter the network decisions. This leads to two key limitations: (a) An attack is dependent on the task-specific loss function (e.g. softmax cross-entropy for object recognition) and therefore does not generalize beyond its original task. (b) The adversarial examples are specific to the network architecture and demonstrate poor transferability to other network architectures. We propose a novel approach to create adversarial examples that can broadly fool different networks on multiple tasks. Our approach is based on the following intuition: "Perpetual metrics based on neural network features are highly generalizable and show excellent performance in measuring and stabilizing input distortions. Therefore an ideal attack that creates maximum distortions in the network feature space should realize highly transferable examples". We report extensive experiments to show how adversarial examples generalize across multiple networks for classification, object detection and segmentation tasks.
Computing the interleaving distance is NP-hard
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

We show that computing the interleaving distance between two multi-graded persistence modules is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that deciding whether two modules are $1$-interleaved is NP-complete, already for bigraded, interval decomposable modules. Our proof is based on previous work showing that a constrained matrix invertibility problem can be reduced to the interleaving distance computation of a special type of persistence modules. We show that this matrix invertibility problem is NP-complete. We also give a slight improvement of the above reduction, showing that also the approximation of the interleaving distance is NP-hard for any approximation factor smaller than $3$. Additionally, we obtain corresponding hardness results for the case that the modules are indecomposable, and in the setting of one-sided stability. Furthermore, we show that checking for injections (resp. surjections) between persistence modules is NP-hard. In conjunction with earlier results from computational algebra this gives a complete characterization of the computational complexity of one-sided stability. Lastly, we show that it is in general NP-hard to approximate distances induced by noise systems within a factor of 2.
Better Bounds for Online Line Chasing
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We study online competitive algorithms for the \emph{line chasing problem} in Euclidean spaces $\reals^d$, where the input consists of an initial point $P_0$ and a sequence of lines $X_1,X_2,...,X_m$, revealed one at a time. At each step $t$, when the line $X_t$ is revealed, the algorithm must determine a point $P_t\in X_t$. An online algorithm is called $c$-competitive if for any input sequence the path $P_0, P_1,...,P_m$ it computes has length at most $c$ times the optimum path. The line chasing problem is a variant of a more general convex body chasing problem, where the sets $X_t$ are arbitrary convex sets. To date, the best competitive ratio for the line chasing problem was $28.1$, even in the plane. We significantly improve this bound, by providing a~$3$-competitive algorithm for any dimension $d$. We also improve the lower bound on the competitive ratio, from $1.412$ to $1.5358$.
What is known about Vertex Cover Kernelization?
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We are pleased to dedicate this survey on kernelization of the Vertex Cover problem, to Professor Juraj Hromkovič on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The Vertex Cover problem is often referred to as the Drosophila of parameterized complexity. It enjoys a long history. New and worthy perspectives will always be demonstrated first with concrete results here. This survey discusses several research directions in Vertex Cover kernelization. The Barrier Degree of Vertex Cover kernelization is discussed. We have reduction rules that kernelize vertices of small degree, including in this paper new results that reduce graphs almost to minimum degree five. Can this process go on forever? What is the minimum vertex-degree barrier for polynomial-time kernelization? Assuming the Exponential-Time Hypothesis, there is a minimum degree barrier. The idea of automated kernelization is discussed. We here report the first experimental results of an AI-guided branching algorithm for Vertex Cover whose logic seems amenable for application in finding reduction rules to kernelize small-degree vertices. The survey highlights a central open problem in parameterized complexity. Happy Birthday, Juraj!
Frustrated with Replicating Claims of a Shared Model? A Solution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) innovations are being introduced at such a rapid pace that model owners and evaluators are hard-pressed analyzing and studying them. This is exacerbated by the complicated procedures for evaluation. The lack of standard systems and efficient techniques for specifying and provisioning ML/DL evaluation is the main cause of this "pain point". This work discusses common pitfalls for replicating DL model evaluation, and shows that these subtle pitfalls can affect both accuracy and performance. It then proposes a solution to remedy these pitfalls called MLModelScope, a specification for repeatable model evaluation and a runtime to provision and measure experiments. We show that by easing the model specification and evaluation process, MLModelScope facilitates rapid adoption of ML/DL innovations.
Spatio-Temporal Road Scene Reconstruction using Superpixel Markov Random Field
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Scene model construction based on image rendering is an indispensable but challenging technique in computer vision and intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we propose a framework for constructing 3D corridor-based road scene models. This consists of two successive stages: road detection and scene construction. The road detection is realized by a new superpixel Markov random field (MRF) algorithm. The data fidelity term in the MRF's energy function is jointly computed according to the superpixel features of color, texture and location. The smoothness term is established on the basis of the interaction of spatio-temporally adjacent superpixels. In the subsequent scene construction, the foreground and background regions are modeled independently. Experiments for road detection demonstrate the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in both accuracy and speed. The scene construction experiments confirm that the proposed scene models show better correctness ratios, and have the potential to support a range of applications.
Three-Dimensionally Embedded Graph Convolutional Network (3DGCN) for Molecule Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We present a three-dimensional graph convolutional network (3DGCN), which predicts molecular properties and biochemical activities, based on 3D molecular graph. In the 3DGCN, graph convolution is unified with learning operations on the vector to handle the spatial information from molecular topology. The 3DGCN model exhibits significantly higher performance on various tasks compared with other deep-learning models, and has the ability of generalizing a given conformer to targeted features regardless of its rotations in the 3D space. More significantly, our model also can distinguish the 3D rotations of a molecule and predict the target value, depending upon the rotation degree, in the protein-ligand docking problem, when trained with orientation-dependent datasets. The rotation distinguishability of 3DGCN, along with rotation equivariance, provides a key milestone in the implementation of three-dimensionality to the field of deep-learning chemistry that solves challenging biochemical problems.
Parallel approach to sliding window sums
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Sliding window sums are widely used in bioinformatics applications, including sequence assembly, k-mer generation, hashing and compression. New vector algorithms which utilize the advanced vector extension (AVX) instructions available on modern processors, or the parallel compute units on GPUs and FPGAs, would provide a significant performance boost for the bioinformatics applications. We develop a generic vectorized sliding sum algorithm with speedup for window size w and number of processors P is O(P/w) for a generic sliding sum. For a sum with commutative operator the speedup is improved to O(P/log(w)). When applied to the genomic application of minimizer based k-mer table generation using AVX instructions, we obtain a speedup of over 5X.
Disentangling sources of influence in online social networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Information propagation in online social networks is facilitated by two types of influence - endogenous (peer) influence that acts between users of the social network and exogenous (external) that corresponds to various external mediators such as online news media. However, inference of these influences from data remains a challenge, especially when data on the activation of users is scarce. In this paper we propose a methodology that yields estimates of both endogenous and exogenous influence using only a social network structure and a single activation cascade. Our method exploits the statistical differences between the two types of influence - endogenous is dependent on the social network structure and current state of each user while exogenous is independent of these. We evaluate our methodology on simulated activation cascades as well as on cascades obtained from several large Facebook political survey applications. We show that our methodology is able to provide estimates of endogenous and exogenous influence in online social networks, characterize activation of each individual user as being endogenously or exogenously driven, and identify most influential groups of users.
Higher-order Projected Power Iterations for Scalable Multi-Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The matching of multiple objects (e.g. shapes or images) is a fundamental problem in vision and graphics. In order to robustly handle ambiguities, noise and repetitive patterns in challenging real-world settings, it is essential to take geometric consistency between points into account. Computationally, the multi-matching problem is difficult. It can be phrased as simultaneously solving multiple (NP-hard) quadratic assignment problems (QAPs) that are coupled via cycle-consistency constraints. The main limitations of existing multi-matching methods are that they either ignore geometric consistency and thus have limited robustness, or they are restricted to small-scale problems due to their (relatively) high computational cost. We address these shortcomings by introducing a Higher-order Projected Power Iteration method, which is (i) efficient and scales to tens of thousands of points, (ii) straightforward to implement, (iii) able to incorporate geometric consistency, (iv) guarantees cycle-consistent multi-matchings, and (iv) comes with theoretical convergence guarantees. Experimentally we show that our approach is superior to existing methods.
Training Multi-layer Spiking Neural Networks using NormAD based Spatio-Temporal Error Backpropagation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered a great amount of interest for supervised and unsupervised learning applications. This paper deals with the problem of training multi-layer feedforward SNNs. The non-linear integrate-and-fire dynamics employed by spiking neurons make it difficult to train SNNs to generate desired spike trains in response to a given input. To tackle this, first the problem of training a multi-layer SNN is formulated as an optimization problem such that its objective function is based on the deviation in membrane potential rather than the spike arrival instants. Then, an optimization method named Normalized Approximate Descent (NormAD), hand-crafted for such non-convex optimization problems, is employed to derive the iterative synaptic weight update rule. Next, it is reformulated to efficiently train multi-layer SNNs, and is shown to be effectively performing spatio-temporal error backpropagation. The learning rule is validated by training $2$-layer SNNs to solve a spike based formulation of the XOR problem as well as training $3$-layer SNNs for generic spike based training problems. Thus, the new algorithm is a key step towards building deep spiking neural networks capable of efficient event-triggered learning.
Unsupervised Image Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks have achieved great successes on the image captioning task. However, most of the existing models depend heavily on paired image-sentence datasets, which are very expensive to acquire. In this paper, we make the first attempt to train an image captioning model in an unsupervised manner. Instead of relying on manually labeled image-sentence pairs, our proposed model merely requires an image set, a sentence corpus, and an existing visual concept detector. The sentence corpus is used to teach the captioning model how to generate plausible sentences. Meanwhile, the knowledge in the visual concept detector is distilled into the captioning model to guide the model to recognize the visual concepts in an image. In order to further encourage the generated captions to be semantically consistent with the image, the image and caption are projected into a common latent space so that they can reconstruct each other. Given that the existing sentence corpora are mainly designed for linguistic research and are thus with little reference to image contents, we crawl a large-scale image description corpus of two million natural sentences to facilitate the unsupervised image captioning scenario. Experimental results show that our proposed model is able to produce quite promising results without any caption annotations.
Sequentially Aggregated Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Modern deep networks generally implement a certain form of shortcut connections to alleviate optimization difficulties. However, we observe that such network topology alters the nature of deep networks. In many ways, these networks behave similarly to aggregated wide networks. We thus exploit the aggregation nature of shortcut connections at a finer architectural level and place them within wide convolutional layers. We end up with a sequentially aggregated convolutional (SeqConv) layer that combines the benefits of both wide and deep representations by aggregating features of various depths in sequence. The proposed SeqConv serves as a drop-in replacement of regular wide convolutional layers and thus could be handily integrated into any backbone network. We apply SeqConv to widely adopted backbones including ResNet and ResNeXt, and conduct experiments for image classification on public benchmark datasets. Our ResNet based network with a model size of ResNet-50 easily surpasses the performance of the 2.35$\times$ larger ResNet-152, while our ResNeXt based model sets a new state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet classification for networks with similar model complexity. The code and pre-trained models of our work are publicly available at https://github.com/GroupOfAlchemists/SeqConv.
HCqa: Hybrid and Complex Question Answering on Textual Corpus and Knowledge Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Question Answering (QA) systems provide easy access to the vast amount of knowledge without having to know the underlying complex structure of the knowledge. The research community has provided ad hoc solutions to the key QA tasks, including named entity recognition and disambiguation, relation extraction and query building. Furthermore, some have integrated and composed these components to implement many tasks automatically and efficiently. However, in general, the existing solutions are limited to simple and short questions and still do not address complex questions composed of several sub-questions. Exploiting the answer to complex questions is further challenged if it requires integrating knowledge from unstructured data sources, i.e., textual corpus, as well as structured data sources, i.e., knowledge graphs. In this paper, an approach (HCqa) is introduced for dealing with complex questions requiring federating knowledge from a hybrid of heterogeneous data sources (structured and unstructured). We contribute in developing (i) a decomposition mechanism which extracts sub-questions from potentially long and complex input questions, (ii) a novel comprehensive schema, first of its kind, for extracting and annotating relations, and (iii) an approach for executing and aggregating the answers of sub-questions. The evaluation of HCqa showed a superior accuracy in the fundamental tasks, such as relation extraction, as well as the federation task.